We would also appreciate your feedback on Chinese Buddhist Encyclopedia. Please write feedback hereHere you can read media articles about the Chinese Buddhist Encyclopedia which have been published all over the world.

After seeing into his or her true nature, the student deepens their experience through further koan work. Not getting stuck in a particular place, at a particular stage. This work enables the student to awaken to other aspects of the Zen Way, and to learn to express and embody their awakening. This is the path of deepening and maturing your awakening, and necessarily takes a long time.

Koan literarily translated means “public record.” “Public” (kō) refers to what is in common between us, “the single track followed by all the sages, the highestprinciple which serves as a Way for the world.” “Record” (an) refers to “orthodox writings that the sages regard as principles.” These formal implications of the word “koan” have analogies with legal records, legal precedents, which provide a reliable basis for judgement. This means that koans can be used to test the depth of the water, the depths of the students realization. When a student is stuck on a particular koan it also shows where they are blocked.

Koans sometimes develop through dialogue between a Zenteacher and a student, or another teacher. Sometimes they are conveyed as a story, sometimes a poem:
From a well that has never been dug, Water ripples in a spring that does not flow.
Someone with no shadow or form is drawing the water.

Characteristics of the koan: Although koans can sometimes appear to be riddles, they aren’t subject to any kind of intellectual resolution, and are neither expressive of cleverness, nor responsive to it. Sometimes koans are paradoxical in their expression. Paradox and dilemma are in the service of the Middle Way, which is not some kind of a mean between extremes, but true nature as it unfolds here and now: timeless and timeful,in the same breath.
What is the koan of your life?

Whatever arises by away of insight or understanding, you let go of. Regarding effort, use the energy you have. It’s like swimming underwater in the darkness. From time to time you get caught up in the water weed. You push it aside, glide for a while, renew the question as to the one who hears, and keep going.

After a time––it’s not clear how long––you are no longer aware of the silent avalanche of notions you once held dear. Eventually you reach a place where you are blocked; and can neither advance, nor retreat. In that place, you just renew your questioning.

You are like a dark ravine, a mysterious valley. It’s as if you are pregnant, but you can’t give birth. Everything waits, in a dark pause, aching to be breathed out, to come into life. You feel edgeless: it’s like looking into a mirror that shines back darkness only. The night moves on little feet, or big feet, depending.

It doesn’t make any sense to return to your koan – you just do, and then again.
The deeper into the koan you go, the more you leave behind; the more you leave behind, the deeper you go.

After a long time, waiting wears itself out. You expect nothing. It is like walking out on a long jetty at night without being able to see your hand in front of your face, and hearing the sound of water lapping in the darkness.

This is beyondreason, and the Way gathers in darkness; it also gathers as your struggle to return to your koan, with sleep closing in. Mostly you don’t notice this gathering; in fact, most of the time you feel a bit desperate and wonder why you’re doing such an unreasonable, impossible practice.

If you’re questioned concerning your koan, you don’t know, and still you don’t know. It’s important to settle into that not knowing, which isn’t the blankness of ignorance, but rather, of a profound mystery that cannot find its tongue.

At this stage of the journey, it doesn’t pay to get too interested in the spectres of failure. It’s good, too, not to be led about by our ideas about the great sea change we’re undergoing, either. Later, such preoccupations can be looked at in the light of the moon, and their root systems uncovered in the cultivation that continues after enlightenment.

The moon rises and reflects in the water in its own good time. Meanwhile, you come up to the gate a thousand times. When your time is ripe, under cover of darkness, you go through.